Come Dancing by Leslie Wells Page B

A line from one of my favorite poems by Aragon came to me: Your eyes are so deep that leaning down to drink to them, I saw all mirrored suns repair.
    “ Tes yeux sont si profonds qu’en me penchant pour boire. J’ai vu tous les soleils y venir se mirer .”
    A slow smile spread across his face. “ Merci beaucoup ,” he said. “I’ll take that.”
    “You liar!” My face was burning. “You said you didn’t speak French!”
    “All I said was, languages don’t come easily to me. Hey.” He touched my arm. “Don’t be embarrassed. I didn’t get all of it, just that my eyes look like malted milkballs in a bowlful of milk.”
    “You tricked me.” I picked at my napkin.
    “That was one of the nicest things anyone’s ever told me. Especially since you didn’t think I’d get it.”
    “All right, I guess.” I took a gulp from my flute. “It’s a line from a poem I like. Consider it the champagne talking.”
    “I’ll have to give you champagne more often.” Jack sat forward, arm on the table. “I know you wouldn’t have said it if you thought I understood. Julia,” he said, looking me in the eyes, “you have no idea how sick I get of people fawning and flattering; all the parasites wanting a piece of me. A lot of guys’ll use you worse than women, even. You think someone’s your friend, then it turns out they just wanted something off you—introduce them to the head of a record company, promise to act in the script they’re writing, get them in with a model. It barely even bothers me anymore. Most girls would’ve had me take them shopping before we went out tonight. But you don’t want anything, do you?”
    Flushing under his gaze, I picked up my glass and watched the bubbles rising to the top. “I like to make my own way. I don’t want to be dependent on anyone.”
    “You’re scrappy. Me too; I was always like that. Had to be.”
    The waiter came and Jack signed for the bill. “They’ll send it to Mary Jo,” he explained when they took it without a credit card. He left some cash for the server and we rushed past the bar crowd to the car. I tried to decide which of the double back doors I should step into before Jack helped me in.
    “Where to?” Rick said.
    “Want to sit by the river for a while, get some fresh air?” Jack asked.
    “Sure.” I hoped it wasn’t obvious how sozzled I was.
    Rick drove over to the West Side Highway and we found a bench in an area that seemed entirely deserted. A salty funk came off the river, not at all unpleasant. The moon was a golden smattering in the water; I could hear waves lipping the pilings. We sat in silence for a minute, looking at the distant lights of Hoboken. Jack turned to face me, elbow on the back of the bench. The breeze lifted his hair off his forehead, eyes glowing dark beneath his expressive brows. “You’ve been in New York, what, a year for school and then a year working?”
    I wondered why he was asking. “Yes. I plan on staying put.”
    “You seem like … you’re not attached. To anyone,” Jack said, looking directly at me.
    “N-no,” I stammered, disconcerted by the intensity of his gaze. “I’m not with anyone right now.”
    “Who was Art? I saw his name crossed out in your address book. Looked like you stabbed it a few times with your pen.”
    “Oh, he …” I hesitated. “I went out with him last year.”
    “Serious boyfriend?”
    “For a while. He was a professor in the English department. He was separated from his wife, but then they got back together, and that was that.” I gazed out over the water. The rippling of the waves created a similar floating sensation in my head. God, why of all nights did I have to get wasted?
    “Hmm. Nobody else since?”
    “No.”
    “Took you a while to get over him?”
    “Yes.”
    “Over him now?”
    My pulse gave a leap. I looked at Jack’s thick, tousled hair and the lines at the side of his mouth, and nodded.
    “Good enough. Any questions for me?”
    Nicole the